Mac Pro Upgrade vs new iMac

I'm also a photographer, and have recently gone through the process of deciding what to do about the same Mac Pro that you have.... the 2008 Octocore.

My solution was to buy another Mac Pro off of the refurbished store... the one feature it needed to have was fast memory. The 2008s have a memory bus that moves RAM around at 800 MHz. The Mac Pros on the refurbished store in Canada are listed at either 1066 or 1333 MHz. I got one with 1333.

To be honest, I don't know how much difference that will make, but...they were very similarly priced and I like to keep as much of my photo in RAM as possible.

So, here is my thinking about the iMacs and the Mac Pros. Thunderbolt won't really get you any more HDD speed... not much anyway, as I understand it. The bottleneck is not moving data over the cable - if you have FW800 - but with the speed the HDD can actually read and write the data.

You don't say how big the drives are inside your Mac Pro. As I understand it you can easily put 5 x 2TB drives inside. More with a bit of hacking. A 2008 Mac Pro won't accept a Thunderbolt card, but it will accept eSATA PCI cards, if I recall correctly. An eSATA PCI card will allow you to connect external HDDs that can read/write at the same speed as the internal HDDs. Basically, you are adding internal drives on the outside of the box... if that makes sense.

Are your HDDs fast or slow? Different drives are set to spin their platters at different speeds. Laptop (and generally cheaper) drives spin at 5400rpm, the Mac Pros generally come with drives that spin at 7200rpm - and you can get drives that spin at 10,000rpm. The faster the spin, the faster the drive can read/write data. If you have stocked your Mac Pro with 5400rpm drives then simply swapping them out for 7200rpm drives should make a noticeable improvement. The old drives can be kept for archiving or backup drives.

That Mac Pro can take up to 32GB of RAM, so there is an upgrade path there. The problem is, RAM for these Mac Pros is expensive. There is an easy way to tell if your system is RAM starved though. When you are editing a photo... make it one of your larger ones, because you want to test against the extreme condition ... open the activity monitor and look at the System Memory tab. Excessive 'Page Outs' here indicates you are RAM starved. No 'Pages Outs' or with amounts that are small indicate that you have adequate RAM. Do some searches on these forums for more guidance, using the "Page Out" search term.

One thing that a new iMac or Mini will have that your 2008 doesn't have is a warranty. For me that was the deciding factor for retiring my 2008. I wanted a system that I would not have to pay to repair for another 3 years. Repairs on these systems tend to be expensive. Since my retired 2008 still works fine, it is still worth a fair bit on the secondary market. I'm hoping to get about 25% back on what I paid for my 'new' refurbished 2010 Mac Pro. Your 2008, with 10GB of RAM and perhaps a couple of HDDs thrown in, will also be worth some money that will help subsidize whichever route you take.

The other advantage of swapping in a 'new' refurbished Mac Pro is that you can swap over your non-boot drives easily. Since the 'new' Mac Pro came with Mountain Lion, I just left it in place... but I moved my photo drives over in about 5 minutes. As well, the boxes are nearly identical. So all of the peripherals just plugged in. Easy Peasy.

This is my story, and it may not necessarily apply to your situation... but I hope it helps.

As soon as the new iMacs are released I am making the switch from Mac Pro. Since universal audio has a thunderbolt solution for the DSP processing there is nothing else holding me to the Mac Pro. I will just grab a promise r4 raid for storage and call it a day. At least till the new Mac Pro is released. Then I will most likely switch back. I am a glutton for punishment.

My Take on iMac - just an over sized MacBook Air with little options.
Before I did the MP - Apple Techs at the store steered me well.

And why would anyone not be able to shop for used MP's in the US from across the Pond for far less?

It has to be a heck of a lot easier than my attempt from the US trying to access a Swedish site to purchase a unit for my Girlfriend there.

Even if you had to switch out power supplies to comply with 220 vs 110v.

Just sold my Mac Pro s x 2.8 GHz 8 core Xeon. Same as yours.

I got $1050 for it and I'm putting that towards a iMac 27" The iMacs are so good these days that you no longer need a Mac Pro for photography work. In the past, people bought Mac Pros for their power, expandability and because they needed to use non-glossy, color accurate displays for photo editing.

The refurb Mac Pro that snberk103 suggested is also a good idea. And I would recommend this as well IF and it's a BIG IF you already have specialty display monitors you use for your photo editing. If not, get the iMac